Cultural epoch from the end of the 19th century until the first part of the 20th century. Heavily influenced by cultural changes and events, like the World Wars, rapid technological development and the city as new living space. Characterized by an array of avantgardistic movements in the arts (surrealism, expressionism…).
David Shields’ Reality Hunger is subtitled “A Manifesto.” The whole title is: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. When was the last time you saw that sitting on a bookshelf–that word, “manifesto”? When was the last time you wrote one, or wished somebody else would, or waved one in somebody’s face and said, “Look, here’s how it’s …
Metamodernism is above all about oscillation. Or at least for me it is. It is about the oscillation between the modern and the postmodern, history and ahistoricity, optimism and pessimism, sincerity and irony, the concept and the material, the figurative and the formless, narrative and the plotless, discursive originality and individual intertextuality, meaning and meaninglessness. …
At the end of the nineteenth century, the French writer Arthur Rimbaud urged us to be modern, nothing but modern, with a phrase that was as idiomatic as it was programmatic: “Il faut être absolument moderne” (1873). Recently, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, known for his non-conformist critique of postmodern relativism, took up the challenge to …
The first thing that distinguishes Hollywood-actor-turned-fashion-designer Thom Browne from most fellow American designers is his lust for provocation but also a certain rigidity and appeal to discipline. An American through and through, his designs are as iconic in referencing his national background as they emblematise a critique of the US Establishment which, in his opinion, …
It has become somewhat of an axiom to associate certain artistic practices to specific discourses, and specific artists to certain sensibilities. It has become a truism, for instance, to link practices as diverse as eclecticism, parody, pastiche, detachment, flexi-narrative, and parataxis to the postmodern, and strategies like ‘optimism’, self-consciousness, formalism, functionalism, purism, and streams of …
Hard-boiled wonderland, blue velvet and the end of postmodernism Read More »
The modern is associated with politics as diverse as utopism, formalism, functionalism, seriality, art for art’s sake, the flaneur, syntaxis, restlessness, alienation, streams of consciousness, the cinematic apparatus, cubism, Reason, trauma, mass production, and schizophrenia. The postmodern tends to be associated with strategies as varied as dystopism, late capitalist flexibilisation, the ‘end of history’, formalism, …
